As enterprises collect larger and larger volumes of data about their target markets, customer and community structured data (e.g., customer relationship management (CRM) data and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data) is becoming an increasingly smaller percentage of the overall data domain. At the same time the need to interconnect the data and use it to produce analytics and data driven business decisions has grown.
A single persistence solution to data management requires significant tradeoffs and creates complexity in the management of data and abstraction of components required to manage and search the data effectively. A single database may be well suited to storing data, and managing relationships between the data, but may not be suitable to both purposes simultaneously. Relational databases excel at managing relationships between aggregated data. However, when attempting to manage relations between disaggregated data, relational models require creating a predetermined hierarchy which may be brittle and exceptionally difficult to manage.
What is needed is a flexible persistence solution for providing data management of amorphous data without a fixed hierarchical relationship while maintaining robust searching and indexing functionality.